It’s not an understatement to say that Juanita Stein is one of my favourite musicians. She’s definitely the finest maker of expansive purple-rock in the world. I say purple, because there’s something dark with the faintest glimmer of a sunrise or a nebula about everything she’s done in Howling Bells, and something a little more bruised about her solo work to date.
She’s about to release an absolutely extraordinary 3rd solo album (released via Nude Records on 23rd October 2020 | juanitastein.com), more on which by me below, but first… here’s Juanita to tell you about a special Unhappy Playlist she’s compiled 4 U.
Juanita Stein: I didn’t have to search especially hard to find 20 songs that fit the description for this playlist:
“tracks I love that have a river of melancholy running through them”.
Since I can remember listening to music, I can recall the intrigue and magnetism I felt when listening to songs that made me think and feel something other than what I was being fed via radio and TV.
I was raised in a household filled with all sorts of music, mostly folk, blues, and Rock’n’Roll, this taught me from a young age to seek out more. I also attended a religious Jewish school and was learning and performing an array of very old songs with deep rooted Middle Eastern melodies and ancient philosophies. So I’ve no doubt those found a way to lodge themselves deep inside my musical mind.
Major to minor, major to minor, 7ths and diminished chords are the ones I lean towards, which is why I find something deeply comforting and motivating in most good blues and soul. Not to mention the voices themselves which carry years of deep wisdom and anguish, like one of my favourite vocalists Etta James singing “I’d rather Go Blind” or the beautiful Mississippi John Hurt singing “Boys, You’re Welcome”. And speaking of old voices, I only discovered Lhasa this year and couldn’t believe deeply beautiful and old worldy her voice sounded.
Then there’s my love of pop music from the 1950s and 60s, which possesses something innately dark about it, which I’m drawn to - I think the political and social overtones of the era help to give it that feeling. Anything by The Flamingos or The Beach Boy’s possess that insular/under water sound and feeling I love so much. And Elvis’s cowboy version of Blue Moon is truly one of the strangest and most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.
But I don’t only love old stuff obviously!
I’m just going back to the roots. I think there’s a lot of incredible stuff happening in indie and R&B. The new cowboys and cowgals, Kevin Morby, Deerhunter, Angel Olsen make soulful, country tinged Rock’n’Roll. Solange, Frank Ocean and Tyler the Creator are rolling music forward. They’re infusing something so wholly truthful and innovative into a formulaic genre. Marrying art, politics and melancholy, which somehow all together manages to be incredibly uplifting.
Ultimately, that’s what I find present in all of these songs, hope and strength and a truthfulness which is is far more inspiring to me than anything else. I love this interview I read with Leonard Cohen recently where he says “I think there’s an appetite for seriousness. Seriousness is voluptuous, and very few people have allowed themselves the luxury of it. Seriousness is not Calvinistic, it’s not a renunciation, it’s the very opposite of that. Seriousness is the deepest pleasure we have.”
Tracklisting:
Lhasa De Sela - Love Came Here
Irma Thomas - Ruler Of My Heart - Remastered 2002
Kevin Morby - Crybaby
Deerhunter - Death in Midsummer
Etta James - I'd Rather Go Blind
The Beach Boys - In My Room - Remastered
Mississippi John Hurt - Boys, You're Welcome
Frank Ocean - Pink + White
Fleetwood Mac - That's All for Everyone - 2015 Remaster
Tame Impala - Nangs
Solange - Dreams
The Mamas & The Papas - Dedicated To The One I Love
Roy Orbison - My Prayer
The Flamingos - Mio Amore (My Love)
Gillian Welch - My First Lover
Chilly Gonzales - Escher
Elvis Presley - Blue Moon - Take 9/M
Leonard Cohen - Master Song
Joni Mitchell - Little Green
John Barry, English Chamber Orchestra - The beyondness of things
Earlier this year, Juanita invited me to write the biography for her new album. After being utterly blown away by the record, here’s what I wrote:
JUANITA STEIN
SNAPSHOT
Released via Nude Records on 23rd October 2020
juanitastein.com
“It feels fundamental to understanding the devastation and eerie silence thrust upon us after his sudden death,” begins the Brighton-based, Australian songwriter Juanita Stein, discussing the moment of great sadness that inspired her new record. “It was a daunting task to sum up the life of one man such as my father. He was endlessly inspiring, charming, deeply talented and passionately spiritual. He admirably, and at times frustratingly, carried the torch for his own musical career until the very end.”
It’s within this processing of a life well-lived and attempting to wrestle with the tides of her own grief, that what would become the album began to ebb and flow out of Stein, who first became known for her work as singer and guitarist in Howling Bells, and now bout to release her third solo LP, “Snapshot”.
Let’s rewind a little… “In early 2019 he became suddenly very, very ill. From the moment I received that panicked phone call from my mother in the ambulance, life took on a profoundly surreal hue.”
“Shortly after, he was diagnosed with AML (Acute Myeloid Leukaemia). Untreatable in his condition. Nothing felt real, nothing felt right, at times, I tried not to feel anything at all. Life was littered with symbolism, a toy snake on the ground (he dreamed of snakes the week before), the black crow outside his hospital room, a dream about my grandmother, these were almost certainly all symbols to me.”
“That’s when I started writing the songs which would end up on “Snapshot”. They came thick and fast. I demoed everything that manifested, I felt a compelling inspiration I’d not felt before.”
The first song that tumbled out of Stein was ‘Lucky’, and its scorched opening line “I feel the fire, I feel the change.” Juanita says “it marks the precise moment life suddenly bounds into a new existence.” The result is a lyric that rides a deceptively rousing groove. You can sense the both sullen rage of the initial stages of grief and a need to seize life stretching out like two limbs into the empty spaces.
‘Lucky’ follows the brave-faced puffed-chest of the album openers. ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6’ seem to walk up a mountain of denial whilst becoming increasingly noisy in a Buckleyesque fashion before turning around to survey the “L.O.T.F”. Of the latter track, Juanita explains it is “an ode to growing up in Australia, tinged with a sad bitterness.” It is a devilish intersection of a song, with introspective lyrics swimming through snarling guitars.
In times of loss, while seemingly small or insurmountable, we try to centre ourselves however we can. Clusters of memories seem to appear vividly through our telescopic vision as we search for some joy to season the pain. “Five years old, standing on a stack of telephone books in a recording booth in Melbourne, is my earliest musical memory,” reflects Juanita. It’s perhaps this gift of freedom that her father gifted to her that permeates everything she’s ever created. “I was singing a part in one of my fathers songs... a sad, country tinged tune about a man that goes to prison and leaves his bereaving wife and child at home. I was the little girl missing her daddy.”
As the circle of life surges into itself, Juanita’s epiphanies glisten in the moonlit waters. Throughout the album, the time of loss within which the record was written often seems to drift away before swimming against the changing tide like the salmon heading back to where it all began.
You can hear traces of growth and clues about life’s meaning from moments of clarity peppered throughout the record. You can also feel the grainy melancholia and unknowable blackness of the future battling the regression that grief inevitably dredges up. This seesawing sensation comes into high-def focus when Juanita speaks of her “childhood exploding with the sounds of 60s folk, rock’n’roll, delta blues, country and soul. The cliche of a tortured artist with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a pen in the other rings true.” But she adds with soft smirk, “life was never dull.”
In the weightless tenderness of ‘Hey Mama’ there’s a gravity ever present. Juanita says it’s a song that “is me wanting to carry the full weight of my mother’s devastation.” The track feels like the dilating eye of this stormy record. The temperature of the room changes as it rides in on the shoulder of the title track ‘Snapshot’, which was “the last song to be written.” In a moment piercing clarity she admits this “is me clinging on to what I have left of him in my mind.” The one-two of these tracks creates far more than the word devastating can begin to describe.
Combined, everything that comes before these tracks and the splendour that follows, the album feels far brighter and warmer than the cold blue feelings coursing through its veins. In many ways, the expansive sprawl of the record makes it the perfect soundtrack to those afternoons when you crane upside off the end of your bed. Sprawled out, sideways, cowboy boots kicked off during the opening bars... it’s a feeling of allowing the weight of the world to rest on you for a while. In many ways, ‘Snapshot’ is the sound and sensation of those endless days when to dos and possibilities evaporate as you remain motionless, watching the slow drift of clouds. It’s on days like these, when it’s just you, a record, and the flickering cinema in your head. These are the days that Juanita Stein’s third solo record were made for, because that’s the world she’s been fomenting in.
Whilst there’s always been an existential charm to the bruised dark blues and swirling-rock anthemics to her songwriting to date, you can sense a new poise and purpose to this collection of songs. Capturing these upward and downward spirals of emotion wouldn’t be easy.
“After I felt I had enough songs,” Juanita explains, “I was moved to reach out to producer Ben Hillier, who I’d been a fan of since hearing records he made with Clinic, Elbow ad Doves to see if he might be interested in making this album with me.”
Unlike her first two solo albums, “America” (2017) and “Until The Lights Fade” (2018), which were made in just a few weeks and both at studios in the US, ‘Snapshot’ was recorded over the course of eight months at Agricultural Audio, not far from Juanita’s home.
As she says, “This allowed me the time and distance I so craved. Ben was deeply concerned with allowing the songs to breathe and to take the right shape. We laid down all the defining guitar parts and vocals which were then beds for the band to come in and lay their parts on.”
As the record began to take shape, Juanita “called on my brother, Joel Stein, (guitarist in Howling Bells) to play lead guitar, I knew only he could harness the exact frenzied energy needed for the songs. Both he and I were both going through something pretty momentous and I wanted to shift that energy into the music. Evan Jenkins on drums alternated between freeform and thunderous on some tracks, light and barely there on others. Jimi Wheelwright on bass held it all together beautifully.”
The result is a record that feels crafted from a life lived as much as it was clearly excavated from loss. It’s a record that strives to capture more than a passing moment, and succeeds in laying its hands on something bigger than most of us will ever fully understand.
Above all else, it’s a record that whatever you’re going through it whispers, shouts and calls on you to take a moment to go rest your neck over the edge of your bed and keep turning it up, and just listen and feel. Allow yourself to be grounded by loss. Perhaps float into the past to be more present in future, and allow yourself to drift out the other end.
The Unhappy Hour is a weekly dose of melancholic music in your inbox by Drowned in Sound founder, Sean Adams (@seaninsound). It’s also a monthly radio show on Soho Radio, and you can hear recent episodes on Mixcloud here.